Do UN peace operations help forcibly displaced people?

Do UN missions reduce forced displacement? Facing insecure environments, civilians are left with threechoices: staying; moving to a safer community; or moving outside their country. Their aspiration and abilityto move depend on individual characteristics and macro-level factors, such as the social, economic and politicalcontext in which these people live. Research shows that UN missions can impact and reset the macro-levelcontext altered by war, especially in the security andeconomic domain. However, we lack empirical evidenceon whether this impact helps UN peacekeeping tackle forced displacement and returns. This article offers thefirst global analysis of whether and how UN missions canshape aggregate population movements during civilwars. We combine data on outflows and returns of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) with dataon distinct UN missions’ features that we expect to affect population movements, namely the size of theircontingents and their mandated tasks. Using matched samples, we find that the unfolding of the outflows andinflows processes are affected by different features of UN missions. Sizeable deployments decrease IDPs flowsand encourage their return; refugee outflows, on the other hand, may increase in presence of UN missions.Furthermore, missions with displacement-related mandates are associated with decreasing IDP flows overall,but only encourage refugees’ returns.